


you pull me in and i'm a little more brave

by wardo_wedidit



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - High School, First Kiss, M/M, Missing Scene, Practice Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 08:01:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20239450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wardo_wedidit/pseuds/wardo_wedidit
Summary: Patrick tries to work out how he feels about his first kiss with Rachel. David helps.(A little ficlet or missing scene fromGrow Old With Me, the childhood best friends AU from mywedding fic.)





	you pull me in and i'm a little more brave

**Author's Note:**

> So basically, I wrote a childhood best friends AU for another fic and it's basically where my brain lives a lot of the time now. I don’t wanna say this is a missing scene exactly, because I love their first kiss in that fic the way it is, so instead this is like, something else that could have been in the same universe? Maybe? But incorporate it into that story if you want? Anyway, I was just absolutely weak to the premise of practice kissing and had to write it, because there's no big mood like practice kissing and being gay. 
> 
> Also, I swear I will slow down on the fic soon, my semester starts in a little less than two weeks and I'm just trying to finish as many WIPs as possible before then. We'll be back to better, less frequent, more longform stuff after that. :)
> 
> Title from [the queen of first kiss songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECGF_dRwdk).

When Rachel pulls away from their first kiss, her lips are tinged with pink and her eyes scrunched with happiness. Her fingers intertwine with Patrick’s, swinging their hands back and forth for a second where they’re standing on the sidewalk. “I like you, Patrick Brewer,” she says, like she’s so sure of it.

Patrick’s chest is so twisted in knots that he swears he can feel it in his whole body, the tangle pushing its way up his throat and heavy in the pit of his stomach. “Oh,” he says. It’s a stupid thing to say, but he can’t think; he feels like his brain is still trying to process what just happened. But thankfully she laughs, her red hair cascading over her face and catching the sunlight, objectively beautiful.

“What, you couldn’t tell?” she teases, squeezing his hand once before pulling away, heading back towards her front porch. She walks backwards for a couple steps, like she doesn’t want to stop looking at him. In his brain that should make him feel good, but right now he just kind of feels like he can’t breathe.

He raises a hand dumbly as she waves from her porch, screen door swinging after her and then she presses it closed, disappearing into her own life. Patrick lets out a sigh of relief he doesn’t understand.

He’s still frozen idiotically on the sidewalk, feet rooted to the ground, unable to move. Rachel just kissed him. It’s not out of the blue: it’s something he’s been expecting for a while, kind of counting on, actually. But for some reason, he feels like shit.

He turns back toward the road, looking past his truck and the houses and toward the horizon, words coming out of him fervently. “Well, fuck.”

//

“And she just kissed you, just like that?” David asks when Patrick tells him the next day. They’re sitting in David’s backyard in the grass, legs folded, directly across from each other. The Roses’ house sits on quite a bit of land, and if you walk from the back door, past the treehouse and the swing set and down the sloping hill, there’s a pond that’s good for skipping rocks or feeding ducks, and ever since they were young he and David would sit out here and talk, the soothing sound of the water and sometimes the crickets or cicadas relaxing them both, making it easy to get lost in conversation.

This has always been one of their go-to spots. When they were younger, it was just far enough out of Adelina’s orbit that they could get away with things. It’s still serving them well now, providing a good buffer between them and eleven-year-old Alexis, who is still young enough to want to be included in everything they do, whether it’s tossing a baseball around (Patrick is determined to make varsity this year, and even though it’s not David’s favorite activity, he’s willing to help), or working on chemistry homework, or watching TV.

“Yes,” Patrick says, tetchy. “I don’t get why that’s so hard to believe.”

David smirks at him. “It’s not, sorry, I just—I don’t know her very well but I got the impression she was just… shyer than that? And you’re Mr. Take Charge, so.”

Patrick fights a smile. It’s a holdover nickname from his little league coach when they were seven. Besides his parents, David’s the only one who really still uses it.

“She’s not shy,” he says. “She’s really nice, and she got flustered when I insisted on buying her concessions, which was sweet—” Patrick had almost ordered her Twizzlers on instinct, because that’s what David always gets when they go to the movies, but he doesn’t need to know that. “—and she has a really nice laugh.”

He sounds frustrated and he knows it. He knows David can tell too, because he’s looking at him kind with a little bit of something like sympathy. Patrick doesn’t want that, he just wants to figure out why he can’t make himself feel what he wants to with her. He’d asked her out in the first place because it’d seemed like the next logical step: they’d been flirty, she’d come to one of his baseball games and made a sign with his number on it, she waited at his locker at the end of the day so they could talk as they walked out together. It was sweet. She was nice. Patrick should like her—by any logic, he should.

It’s so silly, he just feels like… he doesn’t want things to change. He remembers the way he felt when his friend Will from baseball got a girlfriend last year, and then Patrick didn’t have all of his attention anymore. It was this sinking possessiveness, this disappointment he didn’t understand. In fact, he still doesn’t. But he wonders if David feels it too, sometimes, from the way his face falls a little bit when he’s heading down the hallway and sees Rachel standing at Patrick’s locker, the way he turns on his heel and walks away.

Patrick’s only seen it once or twice, but each time, it felt like everything inside him plummeted and hit the ground.

David’s never been anything but supportive in person though, happy to listen and ready to give advice. If Patrick hadn’t glimpsed those other moments, he would have thought David had no qualms about Rachel or about Patrick dating her. Even now, he’s sitting across from Patrick like everything’s normal, smiling slightly, like it could be other day between them, talking about anything else. Patrick loves these moments, when it’s just the two of them. They make him feel the most himself.

“Okay,” David says patiently, smile tugging at the corner of his lips as Patrick meets his eyes again. “So she’s nice, she’s sweet, she has a good laugh. So what’s wrong?”

“Why does something have to be wrong?”

David flaps a hand in Patrick’s direction. “Because it clearly is, you look the same way you did when the Leafs lost in the post-season again, even though they _never_ make it—”

“But we always get close!” Patrick protests, even though they’ve had this argument enough times that once David repeated Patrick’s side back to him—_yes, I remember, sports is about hope and loyalty and faith in your team, I get it_. David gets a smug look on his face at provoking this current outburst, and then he squints a little bit, observing Patrick closely.

“So… was it the kiss?” he asks.

Patrick looks away, blowing out a long breath, because David always knows, he can always tell. He always figures Patrick out eventually, which hardly feels fair when sometimes Patrick thinks he would give absolutely anything to be able to tell what’s going on in David’s head.

“I mean, the kiss was… it was fine,” Patrick says, staring stubbornly down at his shoes. He feels embarrassed to be saying this in front of David, and angry at himself for feeling that way because he’s _never_ embarrassed with David. Not even that time they had a sleepover when they were nine, and Patrick threw up from eating too much pizza and drinking too much soda too fast (he’d immediately regretted it, could hear his mom’s voice in his head saying _why didn’t you make the responsible choice_, but David had sat outside the bathroom door to make sure he was okay and that made everything a little bit better). He’s used to being able to share things with David without having to think about them, without having to worry about them, but now the back of his neck is flushing hot and he works a hand over it self-consciously.

He looks up at David and the expression on his face is just what he knew it would be: mouth agape, eyes a little bit wide, shocked but also kind of trying not to be. “What do you mean, _fine_? Kissing should be _great,_” he says, like he’s offended on Patrick’s behalf.

“I don’t know, David, maybe I was doing it wrong,” Patrick says miserably.

He doesn’t want David to think it’s Rachel’s fault, because it’s not. It’s clearly his, for being a late bloomer and waiting until he was sixteen to have his first kiss—his first _real_ kiss, that one at recess with Heather Bowman in fourth grade doesn’t count. David’s been dating, kissing people for years already. The montage plays in Patrick’s brain of the important ones: Stevie Budd, Jake Nichols, Camille Montgomery, Sebastien Raine. There are even more who weren’t: people from parties and games of spin the bottle and drunken bonfire shenanigans. Patrick didn’t necessarily like all of them—far from it, actually, there have not been many that he liked for David— but still, at least he has the experience. If only he could have been like David, if only he wasn’t so scared all the time.

“Mm, that doesn’t seem likely,” David says dismissively, as quick as anything.

Patrick takes a deep breath and tries to shore up the courage to ask what he wants to ask. “What did—what did it feel like? For your first kiss?” he says, flush rising to his cheeks, but he makes himself meet David’s eyes, plucking at the grass between them for something to do with his hands.

David looks slightly surprised by the question and breathes out heavily. “Well, as you recall, I was thirteen and it was with Stevie, which adds a whole other level of cringe looking back on it now,” he says, eyes off in the distance and shaking his head a little bit at himself. Patrick feels so ridiculously fond of him and the way he knows himself, can look back on parts of his history without malice or ill-will or shame, just good-natured humor. His voice is so casual, so easy, like this is nothing at all to talk about, and Patrick hangs on every word, every breath. “I mean, I think it was awkward and kind of messy the way most first kisses are, you know? But we really thought we liked each other at the time, so that made it feel like…” He cuts himself off with a shrug.

“Like what?” Patrick says, trying not to sound too desperate to hear, probably failing.

He watches David press his lips together, guarding against the ghost of a smile on his face, cheekbones tinged with pink. It’s rare to see David blush, it must be from the heat. His voice is a little softer when he speaks again, a little more private. “It felt like… exciting, like butterflies, like I’d been waiting so long for this thing and now I was finally getting it and that felt kind of heady, I guess.”

It’s quiet for a moment, and something inside Patrick sinks. “Mine didn’t feel like that,” he admits, eyes falling back to the ground, voice small and a little bit rough. It didn’t really feel like anything at all. Maybe he’s broken, or maybe counting the seconds until it was over meant he was a horrible person. He’d thought he’d liked Rachel but now he’s wondering if that’s really true, if maybe he’d just liked that she liked him, or if he just wanted to knuckle down and check this off some arbitrary list to get it over with.

“I mean, that’s okay,” David says, voice filled with a gentle kindness and concern that makes Patrick ache. “It’s not—it doesn’t have to be any one way. Some people just don’t really like it at all, and that’s fine too. But, she likes you, and you like her, so it was probably just nerves, you’ll try again and it’ll be fine—”

“Can you kiss me?” he says. He looks up at David all at once on the words, which he hadn’t known he was going to say until they were out of his mouth. David looks startled, and Patrick’s sure the look on his own face is something overly earnest and embarrassing. “I just—what if it’s me? I want to make sure that I’m not messing it up,” he says determinedly, clenching his jaw. He’s torn a bald patch in the grass now, and for a second he’s hit with a vivid memory from when they were kids, sitting right here as the sun went down: Patrick using blades of grass to make loud whistles and David threading together dandelion chains.

“I… yeah,” David says, incredibly, miraculously, and Patrick’s heart jumps in his chest at the simple word. “Um, if it’ll make you feel better, yes, of course.”

Patrick freezes, at a loss, because somehow he wasn’t actually expecting a yes. “Oh,” he breathes.

David’s voice goes high. “Well, you asked!”

“Yeah—yeah yeah yeah,” Patrick stutters, nodding frantically, nervously clearing his throat. His hands are shaking suddenly and he doesn’t know why.

“Okay, then,” David says, defensive, almost twitchy, shooting him a warning glance.

“Okay,” Patrick agrees, trying not to laugh but failing a little bit. That face on David never fails to amuse him, and he’s happy for something recognizable to cling to in this moment.

David scoots in a little so their knees are touching, and Patrick’s heart kicks it up a notch, beating so hard and fast that Patrick wonders wildly for a second if David can hear it.

“Okay,” David repeats, as if he’s steeling himself. “Close your eyes.”

“That’s not fair,” Patrick protests immediately. “You don’t get to direct me, that’s not what this is.”

“Well, do you want me to kiss you or not?” David asks, and so Patrick rolls his eyes hard before letting them fall closed. He hears David let out a breath, all at once, and then he feels David’s hand on the back of his neck, pulling him in, and then David’s lips on his own.

David’s lips are so soft. He notices that immediately, and he didn’t notice it with Rachel, which doesn’t mean _her_ lips weren’t soft, necessarily, he was just—distracted. He’s not distracted with David; he couldn’t possibly focus on anything else but this. It’s a tender sort of press, slow and careful, like David doesn’t want to spook him, thinks somehow he could potentially scare Patrick away. He can hear the blood rushing in his ears, even feels his arms prickle with goosebumps in the hot July afternoon. Just as he starts to let himself sink into it and relax, David is pulling away.

Patrick’s eyes flutter open to see David is looking at him like he’s holding his breath, waiting for the verdict even though that’s the wrong way around from what they agreed. Besides, it’s not enough. “That doesn’t count,” he says before David can get any words out.

David is very still, almost frozen. “What?” he asks, a husk of a sound.

“David,” Patrick says, determined to make this happen before all his nerve evaporates right out of him, “_kiss_ me.”

David looks absolutely floored for a minute, eyes wide and jaw on the floor, and then he’s pulling Patrick in again, rougher this time. His lips are on Patrick’s and it’s the same for a second, and then he breathes, and Patrick opens his mouth and then they’re kissing, _really_ kissing, and Patrick feels a curl of warmth in his gut, electricity sparking through him everywhere. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, ends up reaching to circle one loosely around David’s wrist, keeping him there. David’s kissing him gently, teasingly, and Patrick kisses him back, hesitant at first but gaining confidence when David doesn’t pull away in horror or disgust but somehow keeps going, pulls him closer.

Patrick lets himself fall into the rhythm of it—kissing David is like waves crashing over him, unrelenting but in a nice way… like he could just do this forever, lose himself in it. He follows David’s lead, mimicking what he’s doing with his tongue and trying to be as playful, as confident, as teasing.

It starts to feel like the kiss might be winding down a bit and fuck, that’s the last thing Patrick wants. He moves, shifting without thinking as he gets up on his knees, eyes still closed, moving his hand to cradle David’s face in his palms, keeping him close. David leans back on his hands in response, following easily, hesitantly stretching out his legs and then Patrick’s kind of—straddling him a little bit, basically in David’s lap. He slides his hand over David’s cheek, slow and deliberate, to rest his fingertips lightly on the curve of his neck. David’s hands flutter tentatively up to the small of Patrick’s back, a gentle pressure, a solid support.

And that’s when it becomes—well, they’re making out now, no doubt about it. David is so good at this that it’s almost too much; so intense even when he pauses to take a breath, with the way he pulls away just slightly so he can Patrick slowly open his eyes. They’re so close Patrick can see the little flecks of lighter color in his irises, and then David’s slotting their noses back together, kissing him all over again, and his stomach swoops. Patrick’s never been kissed like this, he didn’t know kissing could be like this: the give-take, push-pull of intensity that ebbs and flows and makes it all the better. Almost like a rollercoaster: the build, the drop, the thrill. Cooling off and heating up, over and over. It makes Patrick _ache_, he wants more, he never wants David to stop touching him because it feels like the most natural thing in the world. David’s full of these _tricks_, like gently biting at Patrick’s lower lip to make his mouth fall open on a gasp, sometimes retreating a little so Patrick has to chase him. Every time he busts out a new one and Patrick responds, David lets out this perfect little whine. It’s a small, delicate sound, and Patrick wants to pay better attention, wants to record it in his brain so he can listen on command.

But then, just like that, David is slowing the kiss, turning it into something soft and tender, letting off the heat. God, maybe he jinxed it, because there’s a finality to his touch when David presses one last, slow, close-lipped kiss against Patrick’s lips before pulling away entirely, putting some air between them. Patrick feels like someone has handed him a second place trophy, and he didn’t realize until right this moment how very badly he wanted first.

He still has a hand on David’s face and he’s panting as he realizes it’s over. David’s eyes are hopeful and frightened all at once, clear but also holding something impenetrable in there that Patrick can’t reach, a kind of question he can’t translate. David’s hands slide to Patrick’s sides, slow and polite, and Patrick pulls back slowly, untangling himself and moving back across from David a little further than before. He moves on autopilot, since he can’t focus on anything but the fact that his heart is threatening to burst from his body.

David draws his legs up, hugging them to his chest. “Sorry,” he murmurs, the word tiny and broken, and even though Patrick feels out of it, he shakes his head emphatically.

“Don’t—don’t be sorry,” he replies, his voice a hollowed-out shell of a thing. He doesn’t want to look at David but he has to, helplessly.

He’s biting his lip and looking terrified, but maybe trying to hide it too. “How did it feel?” he asks, and Patrick feels like he’s been punched in the gut because couldn’t he _tell_, can’t he see?

“I feel a little dizzy,” he murmurs, and David smiles a little bit at that: it’s the private, real one that Patrick always treasures. He doesn’t know how to articulate how very right all of that felt inside, how he felt the things he thought he might feel with Rachel.

David rocks back and forth a little in the grass, a nervous tic that makes Patrick want to reach for him, reassure him, but he doesn’t know if he should now. “I can confirm you’re not doing anything wrong,” he whispers, nodding solidly like he’s trying to reassure him for some reason and—oh, that’s right, that’s how this whole thing started. That conversation feels worlds away now. “Did you like it?” he asks, even more hesitant, and Patrick feels his eyes sting with emotion, furrows his brow and blinks hard as he nods, chin down, eyes unfocused.

“Good,” David says, generous and happy for him, and Patrick would love to stop feeling like he was run over by an 18-wheeler any day now, but every movement and word and breath from David makes that difficult. “That’s good. Then next time, you probably just need to relax.”

Patrick doesn’t want to relax. He doesn’t want to try again with Rachel, not even a little bit. He wants to kiss David again, but he doesn’t know how to do that without changing everything between them, so instead he clears his throat. “Thank you, David,” he says instead, meaning it so much.

David’s mouth goes a little crooked and he shakes his head as if to say _it was nothing_ but it wasn’t, it wasn’t nothing to Patrick at all, and he doesn’t know if it was nothing to David but he knows for sure he wasn’t in that kiss alone. Something goes tight in his chest, thinking of that. Then David breaks his gaze, lips curling up, tips of his ears going red. “What?” Patrick asks eagerly as David picks at the grass again, his expression like he’s enjoying some private joke.

“Nothing,” he murmurs, glancing at Patrick sidelong, and Patrick huffs a nervous laugh, and then David’s laughing too. They’re laughing, and it’s such a relief that they can’t stop, even though there’s absolutely no cause and they probably look ridiculous. Before long, David is clutching at his stomach, and Patrick has to wipe tears from his eyes, and that’s enough for now. Enough to set them back on course, to bring them back to themselves.

//

“What was it made you laugh like that?” Patrick asks him years later when they’re talking about it. The words are whispered into the skin of David’s shoulder in bed, darkness soft and blue around them. It took a while—much longer than Patrick would have liked—to realize what he was chasing in that kiss with David wasn’t familiarity or confidence or expertise, or anything but David himself. “Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” David says automatically, twisting in his arms to look at Patrick better so that they’re facing each other fully. David lifts his eyebrows like a challenge. “You don’t remember that day?”

“Oh, I do,” Patrick agrees, nodding, pressing in to drop a quick, comfortable kiss to David’s lips. He doesn’t know that he’ll ever stop marvelling that he gets to have those now, after all that time thinking David didn’t want him, or that he couldn’t have him. Now it’s as simple as anything. “I remember it lots.”

And it’s true: it’s hard to forget the rightness of that afternoon, how it felt like a gift and a dream and also like an inevitability, like it was something that was _supposed_ to happen, that he was feeling the way he was _supposed_ to feel. The way the songs played it, the way the movies showed it, the way he didn’t understand before.

David’s smile is slow and shy as he casts his eyes downward, away from Patrick, squirms slightly in his arms under Patrick’s gaze. “I was thinking of butterflies,” he says quietly, looking up at Patrick from under his lashes, and Patrick feels a grin stretch over his own face in response, slow but powerful. David glows to see it, just incandescently happy.

Patrick pulls him in with a hand on his neck and a thumb on his jaw and kisses him, easy with practice, and tries to give them to him all over again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Hang with me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/wardowedidit) for procrastination and emotions. :)


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